It’s
not been two years since utility companies rolled out Smart
Grid, the massive project to restructure the nation’s electrical
system, which includes replacing existing old analogue meters on homes
and businesses with ones that transmit information by radio frequency.
“Smart grid delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers
using two-way digital technology to control appliances at consumers’
homes to save energy, reduce costs, and increase reliability and transparency.”

Old Analogue Meter

But
despite glowing promises of energy savings and lower rates, the project
from the outset has faced opposition from a public that does not want
a technology that can “control appliances” from a point
outside the home, and is increasingly alarmed by the threat the meters
pose to health and privacy. And that opposition is growing.

“There
is a major war being waged in this country, although you'd never know
it by the silence from the old, disgraced media (ABC, CBS, NBC) and
all the cable ‘news’ networks,” writes columnist Devvy
Kidd in a recent
report for NewsWithViews. “This new assault on our bodies
and privacy is over another relatively new piece of technology that
allegedly will save energy … When I say millions of Americans
are up in arms over this, I am not exaggerating.”

Those
millions of Americans come from all points on the political spectrum
– conservative, libertarian, liberal, independent. Democrats and
Republicans, tea partiers and progressives find themselves united against
the local utility company and, ultimately, the U.S. Department of Energy,
the lead agency for the project.

“Governments,
industry bodies, and electric utilities around the world are coming
together with newfound urgency – spurred in some regions by copious
amounts of economic stimulus funds – to stimulate the development
of the Smart Grid,” reports
Pike Research, a consulting firm specializing in analysis of “clean
technology” markets.

All
this, for something for which there is no consumer demand, but is driven
by government fiat. Why this “newfound urgency”? What’s
the hurry? Particularly at a time when economies around the world are
in serious trouble.

Patrick Wood, co-founder of The August Institute and editor/publisher
of The August
Forecast and Review, may have discovered the answer; and he presented
his findings this June at the California
Eagle Forum in Sacramento. It was the group’s Tenth Annual
State Conference, and the organizers chose for a theme: “Agenda
21 and Its Many Tentacles” – of which Smart Grid can
certainly be regarded as one.

As
described by Wikipedia: “Agenda 21 is the action plan of the
United
Nations related to sustainable
development, and was an outcome of the United Nations Conference
on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
in 1992. It is a comprehensive blueprint of action to be taken globally,
nationally and locally by organizations of the UN, governments, and
major groups in every area in which humans directly affect the environment.”

Wood
titled his talk: How Agenda 21 Seeks to Implement Big Brother’s
Technocracy Controls through Smart Meters, Smart Grids, and Smart Growth
– which pretty well sums up his conclusions.

“Smart
Grid enables control over energy (water and natural gas, too!), distribution
and consumption, on a local, national and global basis,” Wood
states on his webpage.

With
its ability to continuously monitor electrical usage and control electrical
devices in people’s homes, “Smart Grid is not just a new
system for delivering electricity more efficiently; it’s the enablement
of Technocracy,” he told his audience; and later: “It’s
a subset of Technocracy.”

Technocracy?

Most
participants at the conference were no doubt familiar with Smart Grid,
particularly since California Eagle Forum President Orlean Koele has
written and published
a book detailing its many threats to health and privacy. But many
of these same attendees appeared never to have heard of Technocracy.
Which isn’t surprising: it was a movement that flourished during
the early 1930s, only to disappear suddenly down the memory hole. Wood
has written several articles on the subject -- including
one in NWV – but watching images and power points projected
onto a screen made his remarks particularly chilling, even for those
who had read his reports.

It
is Wood’s contention that although Technocracy as a movement died
decades ago, the philosophy lived on behind the scenes at Columbia University
where it had been founded, and today is being positioned as the replacement
system for capitalism.

This
would explain the sudden fervor to install a costly project like Smart
Grid worldwide, and Wood mustered compelling information to bolster
his arguments.

“They
cannot make Technocracy happen without Smart Grid in place,” Wood
later told NWV. “They have to have it.”

Worse
than Communism

Here
are a few of Wood’s remarks on Technocracy from his Eagle Forum
address:

“Technocracy,
if implemented, would create totalitarian control, but it is NOT socialism,
communism or fascism. It looks like it but it’s not. Our ladder
is leaning up against the wrong tree on this. It’s totalitarianism
and it is much, much worse.”

“It seeks to replace the price-based economic system with an
energy-based system – think energy currency, think energy credits,
think pricing everything in terms of the energy it takes to produce
it, rather than the free-enterprise market system we have right now
in currency,”

“Technocracy
makes no provision for private property, there’s no mechanism
for accumulating wealth. Everything is controlled by energy production
and consumption, and everything is controlled by the state from the
top down.”

If
this information was new to conference attendees, it was also relatively
new to Wood, who recalled he’d been researching and writing for
35 years about globalization, the global elite, and in particular “the
machinations of the [300-member] group known as the Trilateral
Commission,” yet in all that time had never heard of Technocracy.

About
three years ago he ran across a historical study of an organization
called Technocracy Inc. and, intrigued, was soon immersed in research
on this obscure group and movement. He was amazed at what he found.
Laid out in decades-old academic journals, newspapers and magazines,
was the framework for an entirely new economic-political system
designed to replace capitalism.

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“Technocracy
proposed not just a new shuffle, but a replacement economic system
based on energy distribution and consumption and run by engineers, scientists,
and technicians,” Wood said.

It
had been developed and promoted by just such a group – “technocrats”
they called themselves -- during the early 1930s at Columbia University.
They believed that capitalism was dead and the resulting society should
be micro-managed by experts like themselves. One of its cofounders was
M. King Hubbert, in those days a brilliant young geo-physicist. During
the 1950s Hubbert devised the “Peak Oil Theory,” which holds
that humans are fast using up the planet’s supply of oil. He is
recognized as one of the founding fathers of the environmental movement.

Formally
incorporated as Technocracy, Inc. in 1932, the movement was one of the
most popular the U.S. has experienced, with over 500,000 card-carrying
members at one point. Suddenly it disappeared, rejected by both the
newly installed Roosevelt administration and the public, and “scrubbed”
from history.

But
during the movement’s brief heyday, technocrats created and published
volumes of reports and documents, including a definitive handbook: Technocracy
Study Course.

Circling
the Noose

“These
guys, being scientists and engineers, wrote a detailed list of requirements
that would be necessary to implement Technocracy -- first in America,
then the entire North American continent,” Wood said. Here are
five of those requirements with his comments.

Technocracy,
Inc. 1932: Energy Distribution Requirements

•Register on a continuous 24 hour-per-day basis the total net conversion
of energy: Think Smart Grid for a minute, which you know you’re
going to see•By means of the registration of energy
converted and consumed, make possible a balanced load: You’ll
see the words ‘balanced load’ all over the literature for
Smart Grid…•Provide a continuous inventory of all production
and consumption: Now this is not just for energy: this is all production
and all consumption, but the first blush is of course of energy. •Provide a specific registration of the
type, kind, etc. of all goods and services, where produced and where
used: This is 1932 folks. Are they doing this today? Are we being
sliced and diced with the data and stuff?•Provide specific registration of the consumption
of each individual, plus a record and description of the individual
(Scott Howard, et al, Technocracy Study Course, p. 232: Think Homeland
Security. Think NSA.

In
addition to the five Wood listed, the Study Course has two more requirements:

6.Allow the citizen the widest latitude of choice in consuming his
share of Continental physical wealth [each person’s “share”
to be determined by technocrats]7.Distribute goods and services to every member
of the population.

“They’re
circling the noose of this data collection around us, and now, all of
a sudden, out of the blue comes … Smart Grid. Lo and behold, give
the engineers a list of requirements and they’re going to come
up with a new bright idea lickety-split.”

Replacing
Capitalism

In
1969 Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia, wrote the book
Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic
Era, which Wood has called a “Neo-Technocratic treatise.”
He recalled he’d read it when it was published but it meant nothing
to him. So with a new awareness of Technocracy, Wood reread it, “and
lo and behold I find out that the book parallels exactly what [the technocrats]
said in 1932.”

“Here
are the same themes; the same concepts; in some cases the same phraseology,”
Wood exclaimed. “Brzezinski just used the word technetronic
to replace technocratic. It’s similar, but not quite
the same -- and absolutely the same concept.” Wood contends
that had Brzezinski lived during the 1930s he would have been “leading
the charge” for Technocracy Inc.

In
1973 David Rockefeller and Brzezinski set up the Trilateral Commission,
with the goal of creating a “New International Economic Order.”

Wood
regards Rockefeller as someone who is a master at “hijacking”
other people’s ideas. Technocracy was apparently one of them,
an idea that “Rockefeller and his crowd ended up hijacking for
their own benefit.”

Until
the last few decades the technology didn’t exist for implementing
a technocratic order. For that you need computers capable of maintaining
a “continuous inventory of all production and consumption,”
and registering “on a continuous 24 hour-per-day basis the total
net conversion of energy,” and so on through the other requirements.

You
also need an electrical grid system able to handle massive amounts of
data, one that allows provider access to and control over a consumer’s
electrical devices. You need Smart Grid.

As
noted earlier: “They cannot make Technocracy happen without Smart
Grid in place. They have to have it.”

Another
necessary element is a controller chip in everyone’s computer,
thermostat, washer, drier, and so on. That’s been developed, and
– as Wood put it – “All the major manufacturers are
running nuts over this to put this chip into everything you buy.”

He
predicted that within a year “you aren’t going to be able
to buy a washer,
drier, a new thermostat, air conditioner, or whatever that doesn’t
have this technology embedded in it -- and there is no way to turn
it off within the device.”

One
Contiguous Policy Unit

Smart
Grid doesn’t stop at U.S. borders. There are plans – 50
percent completed -- for creating a North American Smart Grid, with
22 working groups that the Security and Prosperity Partnership “cut
loose with the Dept. of Energy” talking with other countries to
tie the Smart Grid together between Mexico, Canada and the United States
“in one contiguous policy unit.”

Some
elements are already in place and the negotiations are a “done
deal” – “they’re merely working on the build-out
at this point.”

“And
this has all happened in the last three years,” Wood
emphasized. “In 2009 when the financial meltdown happened and
President Obama authorized a recovery stimulus package, $3.4 billion
was ponyed up to be put onto Smart Grid -- just summarily. Nobody paid
attention to it at that time.”

Other
industrialized counties in the world did the same -- Canada, Mexico,
countries in South America, China, Great Britain, Germany, and Switzerland.
“All across the world they spent stimulus money to kick start
Smart Grid in their own countries,” said Wood.

“Does
that tell you something?” he asked. “Who orchestrated that?
Who gave them simultaneously the idea to do it with taxpayer money,
not industry money?”

Contacted
later by telephone, Wood told NWV that U.S. tax dollars did not fund
Smart Grid in foreign countries -- the money came from their own stimulus
packages. “They did it themselves through their own governments.”

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However,
he said, pressure could have been applied probably by the IMF, the World
Bank, or the Bank for International Settlements – perhaps all
three. These organizations “have their hooks” in other countries’
political systems where Smart Grid is being implemented, Wood observed.
“They can make nation states hop and sing and dance to their tune.”

It
Ain’t Over Yet

In
his concluding remarks Wood emphasized that Smart Grid is happening
with no congressional (or parliamentary) oversight in any country. “Nobody’s
looking at this – it’s by executive fiat.”

And
he reminded his audience: “Technocracy makes no provision for
private property, no mechanism for accumulating wealth. Everything is
controlled by energy production and consumption, and everything is controlled
by the state from the top down.”

Last
– a touch of whistling-in-the-dark humor: “It ain’t
over till it’s over. And in the meantime, remember – Smart
Grid is watching you.”

Those millions of
Americans come from all points on the political spectrum – conservative,
libertarian, liberal, independent. Democrats and Republicans, tea partiers
and progressives find themselves united against the local utility company
and, ultimately, the U.S. Department of Energy, the lead agency for the
project.